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2018 Hugo Winners

The winners of the 2018 Hugo Awards, John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) Award for Best Young Adult Book were announced on Sunday, August 19, 2018, at the 76th World Science Fiction Convention.

The administrators received and counted 2,828 valid ballots (2,810 electronic and 18 paper) from the members of the 2018 World Science Fiction Convention.

The Hugo Awards are the premier award in the science fiction genre, honoring science fiction literature and media as well as the genre’s fans. The Awards were first presented at the 1953 World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia (Philcon II), and they have continued to honor science fiction and fantasy notables for well over 60 years.

The winners are:

2018 Associated Awards (not Hugos)

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

Rebecca Roanhorse

The World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) Award for Best Young Adult Book

Congratulations to all the winners! In particular to N.K. Jemisin for the triple – that’s really amazing. I see she also declined a nomination for Best Series.

Speaking of series, the admins seems to have ruled that last years special award counts as a previous nomination, so Expanse, Craft and Toby Daye had nominations enough to be finalists but have been ruled ineligible due to “Not enough words published since last appearance in category”.

Ruling out last year’s finalists seems a sensible decision to me, they’d been nominated on essentially identical criteria last year, and frankly it would have been a bit boring to see them back on the ballot in consecutive years.

Closest result of the night was Best Editor Short Form – Lynne M. Thomas and Michael D. Thomas finished just 6 votes ahead of Sheila Williams.

Most crushing victory was File 770 for Best Fanzine, 20 votes short of a first-count win, easily getting there on the second count.

Missed being on the final ballot by a single nominating vote:Archive of Our Own (Best Related), would have replaced Sleeping with Monsters;
C.C. Finlay (Best Editor, Short Form), would have replaced Sheila Williams;
Yuko Shimizu (Best Professional Artist), would have replaced Kathleen Jennings;Black Gate (Best Fanzine), would have replaced Rocket Stack Rank.

Declined nomination:
Best Series – The Broken Earth (N.K. Jemisin);
Best Editor Long Form – Liz Gorinsky;
Best Professional Artist – Julie Dillon;
Best Fancast – Tea and Jeopardy

For Best Series, N.K. Jemisin declined for The Broken Earth as just noted; also the following were ruled ineligible, due to not having added enough to the series since last year:The Expanse,
The Craft Sequence,
the October Daye books.

Congratulations to all! So glad N. K. Jemisin got her richly-deserved awards — and Martha Wells, for Murderbot #1, and Lynne Thomas/Michael Damian Thomas for the zine. (And Lois for the five gods, and Roanhorse for best new, and everyone else..)

Congratulations to the winners and all the finalists! So happy to see N. K. Jemisin win for the third time–well deserved! I had a wonderful time reading and agonizing over my decisions this year and look forward to next year!

One thing I note on a quick skim of the details is that aside from perhaps a bare handful of diehards, it looks like the Puppies are either gone or thwarted. I didn’t recognize any of the longlisted works as being from their crowd, VD didn’t show up in any editor categories, and Toni Weisskopf only got about a dozen long-form editor nominations. If the Puppy crowd were still nominating in any significant numbers, I would’ve expected them to show up there.

Congratulations, Mike, on winning the Best Fanzine Hugo. But it just shows you how much I am out of sf fandom nowadays – except for what is happening in LASFS, the fannish e-lists, and Corflu – as yours is the only name on the Hugo list which I recognize. *sigh* (And I wonder how many of your readers know of Corflu – I ran Corflu 34, the 2017 version of that fanzine fan con.)

Somebody correct me if I’m interpreting this wrong, but I believe that The Stars Are Legion would have been nominated over New York 2140 if Raven Stratagem had received 2.58 more points and the status quo held elsewhere. If Autonomous had received one more vote it would have displaced The Stars Are Legion in the previous sentence (subject to status quo changes: New York 2140 picked up 6.08 points from Autonomous‘s elimination while Raven Stratagem picked up just 2.5).

I don’t think this is a bad result, especially given that final point result ordering in Novel was closer to the final vote rank than a number-of-ballot ordering. Just interesting.

Nonono. They declared victory and went home. Of course, maintaining their belief in their victory requires sticking their fingers in their ears and keeping their eyes shut tight so that inconvenient realities will not impinge on their fanatically defended belief system, but they are used to that. 😉

@Lauowolf: the Campbell numbers (finalists, not nominations) look close, but there weren’t radical changes in order; in Novel, Provenance was the first work eliminated, but reached 3rd place in the races for lower positions. Makes me wonder what would have happened in Condorcet-style voting — but I’m very glad to see Jemisin three-peat.

@Eric Franklin
I think it bodes well that no one tried to repeal EPH this year. If you remember, the measure that implemented EPH provided for the option for any Business Meeting to vote to suspend it for the next year. It was a safety measure, in case it turned out there were serious problems with it, so it could be turned off without having to wait two years to get something approved and ratified, but I know there were anti-EPH people itching to get rid of it. I felt a sigh of relief when the preliminary Business Meeting didn’t schedule a vote on that (and apparently didn’t debate the issue at all).

Ben Yallow joked that once fans have done something for one or two years it becomes a “tradition” and people will fight against changing it after that. With luck, EPH has reached that state. One can only hope.

Whenever people tell me EPH is too complicated, I tell them that a) when you understand it, the mathematics of it are actually quite beautiful and b) it is right and proper that a science-fiction convention have a space-age voting and nominating system. 🙂 EPH is something fandom should be proud of.

@Mark
I agree that it’s a sensible decision and follows the intention behind the “must publish new stuff”-part of the rules for the category. But based on that I had expected people to not nominate these series – but they have, in large numbers. (Rivers of London is 12th on the longlist, leaving out only Vorkosigan and Temeraire which I don’t think had anything published in 2017 of last year’s finalists. Depending on the overlap, between 25% and 37% of the people who nominated in Best Series have nominated an ineligible one.)

On the other hand, as far as I can tell it is a slight stretch of the rules to define last year’s special award as a previous appearance in the category. So based on that I would not have been surprised if the admins ruled differently, and accepted the apparent wish of the nominators.

I don’t care if they claim victory or not as long as they are either gone or ineffectual.

@Greg Hullender

Agreed. EPH is a good thing, and I hope it continues. It even guarantees that the Puppies can get one spot in each category on the ballot, if they learn to work together (and really feel like flushing their money away, because I’m pretty sure that, until they nominate something worth reading, Noah Ward is going to kick their asses).

Contrarius wrote: “Except that the pups haven’t even had a lot of success with the Dragon nominations this year, which seem to have been taken over in large part by other indie promotion efforts.”

Which is really, if you think about it, the final proof that they were always full of crap when they said that they were just countering the nefarious SJW influence. In a poll where they are just one of many organized voter blocs, they are unable to make their voices heard at all. The only way the “Puppy bloc” ever mattered was when they were the only people voting as a group.

Over the past 2 years, Worldcon has effectively minimized the impact of the Puppy vote via EPH. During that time there have been 25 awards given out to a single person. Of those 25 awards, only 1 has gone to a male (Mike Glyer) for a ratio of 96% female to 4% male. I have a hard time looking at that ratio and thinking that gender does not have at least a moderate impact on Worldcon voting decisions.

Below is the list of Hugo winners from the past years where the award went out to a single person.

2018 Hugos
Best New Writer – Rebecca Roanhorse
Best Young Adult Book – Akata Warrior, by Nnedi Okorafor (Viking)
Best Fan Artist – Geneva Benton
Best Fan Writer – Sarah Gailey
Best Fanzine – File 770, edited by Mike Glyer
Best Professional Artist – Sana Takeda
Best Editor – Long Form – Sheila E. Gilbert
Best Related Work – No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, by Ursula K. Le Guin (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Best Series – World of the Five Gods, by Lois McMaster Bujold (Harper Voyager / Spectrum Literary Agency)
Best Short Story – “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™,” by Rebecca Roanhorse (Apex, August 2017)
Best Novelette – “The Secret Life of Bots,” by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld, September 2017)
Best Novella – All Systems Red, by Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing)
Best Novel – The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

2017 Hugos
Best Novel – The Obelisk Gate, by N. K. Jemisin (Orbit Books)
Best Novella – Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com publishing)
Best Novelette – “The Tomato Thief”, by Ursula Vernon (Apex Magazine, January 2016)
Best Short Story – “Seasons of Glass and Iron”, by Amal El-Mohtar (The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, Saga Press)
Best Related Work – Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, by Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer)
Best Editor – Short Form – Ellen Datlow
Best Editor – Long Form – Liz Gorinsky
Best Professional Artist – Julie Dillon
Best Fan Writer – Abigail Nussbaum
Best Fan Artist – Elizabeth Leggett
Best Series – The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
Best New Writer – Ada Palmer (1st year of eligibility)

I grit my teeth and read the Worldcon after-report of a certain individual, and it really is the saddest attempt of this I’ve seen in some time. Like, I legitimately feel bad for him that either A. he thinks this is some sort legitimate accounting of events or B. that he believes this sort of manufactured declaration has any bearing on anything outside his self-sustained bubble. I can’t imagine anyone buying into it who isn’t so deeply embedded with their hatred of anything or anyone left-of-center that they would be willing to suspend their disbelief with so much spun sugar. It really is pathetic, in every sense of the word.

Isn’t it just as likely that we’re experiencing a boom of female writers winning because the more inclusive Hugos are helping to encourage these authors and their readers? If you loved writers like Jemisin and didn’t think they could win, you wouldn’t join Worldcon and vote. Now you know they can.

I think too that the Puppy shenanigans had an effect that was the opposite of what they were trying for. People who cared deeply about having more women and POC on the ballot were incensed by what was going on with the Puppies and registered in droves to vote for the Hugos. Not all of those new people continued to register and vote in more recent years, but enough have that I’m sure it has an effect on who gets nominated and who wins.